The right to remember

The Court of Justice, a Luxembourg-based tentacle of the European Union, decreed recently that human beings have a solemn right to make mistakes without being pestered about them for the rest of their lives.

This is a laudable notion, and true to the noblest precepts of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Alas, the Bible wasn’t the inspiration for the Luxembourg bureaucrats. The idea flows instead from two enduring European traits: an impulse to airbrush the past and a congenital discomfort with truly free expression. They’re calling it “The Right to be Forgotten.”

The target, on this occasion, was Google, which doesn’t forget anything. The test case, according to EU public relation types, was a hapless Spaniard named Mario Costeja González. He lodged a complaint against a newspaper in his country, and Google Europe, for not purging information about Señor González’ 1998 home foreclosure. His credit is now good, he argued, meaning that the information is “irrelevant.” The court concurred, and—presto!—a new human right was born.

But the right to be forgotten turned quickly into the power to censor search engine databases that link to newspaper archives.